Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ... I had heard of you by t...he hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What ha...s been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us in...capable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Hearing the low soundof a cloud scattering rain...at midnightand thinking for an eternityon his absent young wife,a traveller heaved a sighand with a flood of tearshowled the whole night long.Now, villagers won't let him stayin their place anymore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »